


Tethered by the Press of Our Palms and the Tips of Our Fingers (Sixty Seconds With You)

by orphan_account



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Pushing Daisies Fusion, Angst, Break Up, Breaking Up & Making Up, Childhood Friends, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Getting Back Together, Introspection, Love Confessions, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Romance, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-04 07:37:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21194009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Mikey Way has an extraordinary, exceptionally astounding, supernaturally astonishing superpower: He can bring the dead back to life with only the touch of his fingers. For the most part, his impressively amazing gifts don't interfere much with his life; after all, he rarely encounters dead things, and dead things rarely encounter him. However, all of this changes when he gets recruited to help Private Investigator Ray Toro, and realizes that he needs to bring the ex-love-of-his-life, maybe-still-love-of-his-life back to life.APushing Daisies-inspired AU





	Tethered by the Press of Our Palms and the Tips of Our Fingers (Sixty Seconds With You)

**Author's Note:**

> I've recently been rewatching _Pushing Daisies_, and I was hit with this desperate need to write a _Pushing Daisies_-inspired fic with Mikey Way as the titular character.
> 
> It's been a while since I've written anything, and this is my first Bandom fic, so please let me know if you think there's anything I can improve on -- writing-wise, style-wise, dialogue-wise...anything at all!!
> 
> And on that note, please enjoy the fic. :)
> 
> Update (October 31, 2019): Am I fever dreaming? My Chemical Romance is back together? I've been shaking for hours.

Mikey is only four years old when he discovers his extraordinary powers.  
  
Gerard is seven; he is seven years old, and try as he might, he simply cannot hold back the tears welling up in the corners of his round eyes.  
  
The two boys are huddled around a colourful metal cage. Inside, it contains shredded paper, a neon pink hamster wheel, food pellets contained in a happy-looking container, three extremely chewy chew toys, one bouncy-yet-firm hamster ball, and a decidedly dead hamster.  
  
“Charlotte…” Gerard whimpers. His fingers are clutched on the edges of the cage, paper-white and trembling. He sniffles and feels his baby brother lean further against his side.  
  
“What’s wrong with her, Gee?” Mikey asks. His voice is high and squeaky, and nervousness bleeds into his tone despite his lack of understanding of what exactly is happening. The salt water brimming in his older brother’s eyes is enough to keep the four year old on edge, and Mikey reaches out to lay a baby-soft hand on Gerard’s in an act of solidarity.  
  
“I think—I think she’s dead, Mikey,” Gerard responds after a long while.  
  
“Dead?” Mikey repeats in a whisper.  
  
Gerard swallows and reaches up to swipe away the tears in his eyes. “I think she’s gone, Mikey.”  
  
“Well, when will she be back?”  
  
“I don’t think she is coming back.”  
  
“Oh.” Mikey leans back on his haunches and worries his bottom lip. “What do we do then, Gee?”  
  
“I think…I think we should wrap her up in tissue and bury her,” Gerard sniffles again, feeling a little bit raw and scraped-clean. “I think Charlotte would like the backyard a lot. Maybe we can bury her near the rose bushes; if she had a favourite colour it probably would’ve been red, and the roses are red.”   
  
Mikey, ever loyal, simply says, “Okay, Gee.”  
  
There is a moment of static silence as the two boys continue to gaze down at the prone form of their poor, deceased Charlotte, before Gerard confesses in a shamed whisper, “I don’t—I’m scared. I don’t want to touch her.”  
  
“It’s okay, Gee,” Mikey – who isn’t much braver in this regard, but his love for his older brother overrides all other regards – squeezes two of Gerard’s fingers, and says, “I’ll wrap her up.”  
  
“Okay, okay, okay,” Gerard whispers back, and stands up on two shaky legs. “I’m gonna go grab a tissue. Be careful when picking her up, okay, Mikey?”  
  
“Mmhmm,” Mikey promises with a firm nod of his head. As Gerard stumbles away, Mikey reaches out and gently strokes Charlotte’s still and soft side with one tiny finger.  
  
It’s like a shock of electricity, like when Gerard rubbed a balloon all over himself and then proceeded to poke his fingers into Mikey’s sensitive sides, transferring static and causing bursts of happy laughter to peal out from his younger brother’s beaming mouth.  
  
Charlotte comes to life – literally. It’s not a calm awakening either; instead, the little hamster seems to feel the shock as much as Mikey had, and bursts up in a ball of fur and energy. She proceeds to rush around the cage on four tiny legs, and Mikey is left to scream “_Gerard_!” at the top of his lungs.  
  
Gerard comes rushing back into the room. He gasps and drops onto his knees before peering into the cage with pure wonderment. The two brother’s faces are pressed close together as they stare down at their little, beloved, ex-dead hamster.  
  
“She’s okay—she’s _okay_!” Gerard yelps in glee. Mikey laughs at his older brother’s sheer happiness, and curls into the embrace that Gerard pulls him into.  
  
It is in the midst of this moment of crystalline happiness that Harold, the Way family’s beloved Cockatoo, breathes his last breath, and falls over – exactly sixty seconds after Charlotte’s miraculous resurrection.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
When Mikey is eight years old, the Wentz family moves in next door. They have three children, and all three of them are perfectly pleasant, humorous, and normal. However, Pete is definitely Mikey's favourite of the three.  
  
“_Mikeyway_!” Pete shouts as he comes trampling across their shared lawn. Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz III is perhaps Mrs. Way’s least favourite of the three Wentz children, but Mikey simply can’t think of a single thing that he dislikes about the older boy – especially when the older boy is running over with a wide beam across his muddy face, a Spider-man band-aid taped across his rounded nose, skinned knees, and a soccer ball clutched underneath one scrawny arm.  
  
Mikey pauses from where he is about to enter his home, and turns around to greet Pete with a bashful but earnest smile. “Hi, Pete.”  
  
“Mikeyway!” Pete says once more, before dropping his soccer ball. Mikey watches the white-and-black ball bounce once, then twice, before Pete is grabbing him by his shoulders and pulling him into a warm hug. “I missed you today!” Pete proclaims after pulling away; Mikey’s fingers are still clutched onto the hem of Pete’s jersey, but Pete doesn’t shake him off, and Mikey doesn’t bother dislodging. “Where were you during recess?”  
  
“I was helping Mr. Chang put up the Halloween decorations,” Mikey replies.  
  
“Okay!” Pete replies easily enough. “We were playing soccer during recess today, and I really wanted you on my team, but you weren’t there, so I had to pick Jeffrey as my first player.”  
  
“Jeffrey is better than me at soccer anyway.”  
  
“You would still be my first choice, Mikeyway,” Pete promises earnestly.  
  
Mikey smiles down at his shoes. He can’t think of a single thing he doesn’t like about Pete.  
  
“Really?”  
  
“Really,” Pete says, before wrapping one arm over Mikey’s shoulder, his fingers brushing against the younger boy’s neck and collarbones – Mikey doesn’t push him off even when it tickles. “Anyway! My mom gave me ten dollars today, and I was thinking we can go to Marble Slab. I’ll buy you any ice cream you want, any size.”  
  
“Any size?” Mikey smiles.  
  
“Any size! You’re a growing boy, Mikeyway. You need to eat loads of ice cream to grow up big and strong,” Pete teases. His olive face is bunched up in a wide, happy-looking and happiness-inducing grin, and Mikey knows that he would go to Marble Slab with Pete even if the older boy didn’t promise free ice cream, even if Pete made _him_ pay for the ice cream.  
  
“Okay,” Mikey agrees, and laughs when Pete pumps up his fist in excitement. “I need to tell Gee where I’m going. Just wait here.”  
  
“You can invite him to come with us,” Pete says, ever-eager to please. “I should probably have enough to treat him too.”  
  
“Okay,” Mikey says again. “Wait here.”  
  
Pete smiles his same, Pete-sweet smile, and shoos Mikey away with a gesture of his hand.  
  
Gerard is already wrapped up in all the blankets and throws that call their couch their home – as he dislodged them in order to make their couch home his temporary oasis – and the old Scooby-Doo television show is playing on their television. Mikey already knows what Gerard’s answer will be before he even has to ask.  
  
“I’m gonna go out with Pete,” Mikey announces, dropping his school bag to the floor and watching it wilt over dispassionately. “He promised to buy me ice cream. You wanna come with us?”  
  
Gerard’s eyes barely stray from the screen.  
  
“It’s Scooby-time, Mikey,” Gerard says. Mikey glances over and sees Shaggy and Scooby running away from a monster bearing a jack-o-lantern head. He nods in understanding; typically, he too would prioritize Scooby-time, but Pete is waiting outside with a Spider-man band-aid on his nose, ten dollars in his pocket, and the promise of more Pete-sweet smiles and delightful Pete laughter.  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey says.  
  
“You go and have fun,” Gerard says, finally turning to look at Mikey. He flashes his brother a smile. “I’ll tell you what happens when you come back,” he promises, despite the fact that the two of them have already watched every single episode and can recite every little thing that happens per each and every single episode.   
  
“Okay,” Mikey nods. “I’ll be back later.”  
  
“Bye,” Gerard turns back to the screen.  
  
When Mikey leaves his house, Pete is waiting where Mikey left him. He’s sitting on the front step with his back turned to Mikey. Mikey spends a few seconds watching the way his curls flutter in the gentle breeze of the early autumn air, the browned points of his elbows, and the ridges of his spine that peek out through the fabric of his bright green jersey.  
  
“I’m back,” Mikey announces. Pete turns around with a wide grin, and Mikey is already smiling back in response before Pete even opens his mouth.  
  
“I knew you’d return to me, Mikeyway,” Pete laughs, standing up with a flourish. “I waited and never lost faith that you’d come back.”  
  
“You promised me ice cream,” Mikey says with a shrug, but the smile tugging at the corners of his lips is too happy to mean anything other than the kind of real and genuine happiness than can only come with being with your favourite people in the world.  
  
“I did,” Pete agrees and reaches out to tug on Mikey’s hand. “Come on, let’s go.”  
  
And, tethered to Pete by the press of their palms and the joined tips of their fingers, Mikey follows.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
For a long while, Charlotte’s miraculous resurrection and Harold’s immediate tragic death was simply considered a fluke by the Brothers Way.  
  
However, when Mikey is six, he pokes a dead squirrel found in their front yard with a child-like curiosity and a human-nature disgust, and the squirrel bounces back to life. Gerard screams while Mikey gapes down at his hand.  
  
They watch in shocked silence as the squirrel scampers off, streaking through their yard and across the street, before a piercing shriek cuts through the blue blue-ness of the summer-hot sky.  
  
A woman is standing on the street across from them. She’s screeching and screeching and a Chihuahua lays prone at her feet.  
  
“Dion! Dion!” She yells, dropping to her knees and scooping the Chihuahua into her arms. “Oh god, Dion!”  
  
Their father comes bursting out of the front door at the commotion as Gerard grabs Mikey’s tiny, trembling hand in his own and tugs him into the sheltered safety of their home.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
“Hi Mrs. Way,” Mikey hears Pete say. He scrambles up from his bed, doing his best to shake off the lovingly clingy grasps of his blankets from off his legs, and tumbles to the floor with the grace of a newborn baby fawn. Something crinkles underneath his elbow, and Gerard’s groan of “Not the _Infinity Gauntlet_ issue, Mikey” follows him as he rushes out of his room.  
  
Mikey appears at the top of the staircase just as Pete politely asks, “Is Mikey here?”  
  
Donna Way turns around at the loud ruckus that is her youngest son running down the stairs. She raises an eyebrow at him when he appears at her side, and he gently steers her away.  
  
“I got this, mom,” Mikey says, and Donna rolls her eyes fondly before obediently meandering back to the living room.  
  
Turning around, he smiles sheepishly at Pete. Pete’s already beaming back at him though.  
  
“So, you got a moment to spare for me, Mikeyway?” Pete asks laughingly.  
  
“Sure,” Mikey replies, pulling on his sneakers. “But it’ll cost you.”  
  
“Oh yeah? How much?”  
  
“Where are you taking me?”  
  
“I was thinking Arnie’s Pizza,” Pete says, reaching out and holding Mikey’s hand in his own. Mikey squeezes his fingers gently and uses his other hand to close the door behind him.  
  
“Then it’ll cost you a soda,” Mikey replies. The two of them begin making their way down the street, cutting through the heated hotness of the late summer; despite the humidity cloaking them, Mikey relishes the warmth of Pete’s hand pressed into his.  
  
“Just one soda?” Pete laughs. “You’re a cheap date, Mikeyway.”  
  
“I think you mean I’m a considerate date,” Mikey corrects. The way the laughter bubbles up from Pete – loud and rhythmic and full and good – through the deep recesses of his chest, up his throat, and out of his mouth is almost as nice as the way their shoulders bump into each other and the way their fingers are tangled together in a chaste embrace.  
  
“I’m glad you’re so considerate of my babysitting gig wages,” Pete grins lopsidedly. Mikey gives in to the temptation; he pauses in the middle of the street and leans over to peck Pete’s smiling lips.  
  
It’s like a shock of electricity, the way Pete feels infinite beneath his touch. It’s a shock of electrical currents rushing from Pete through to Mikey – or maybe it’s the other way around, or maybe it’s a give and take and a take and give. Either way, when Mikey pulls back – awkward and gangly and smitten and all of fourteen – Pete is laughing his Pete-sweet laugh and his eyes are twinkling in wonderment.  
  
“I also take payment in kisses,” Mikey says, bashful self-consciousness giving way to confidence in the face of the shape of Pete’s lips and the crinkles blooming from the edges of Pete’s eyes.  
  
Pete leans over and presses a sweet kiss to his lips.  
  
“I can do that,” he giggles into Mikey’s mouth. 

-x-  
  
  
Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz III is almost unbearably loud, and hyper, and full-of-energy, and friendly, and smiley. While Mikey simply feels a modicum of unsurety and hesitation, Gerard immediately makes himself sparse. He needs to “find my copy of _The Sandman_, mom”, and falls into the pit that is his room, never to be seen again – or, at least, never to be seen again for the duration of the Wentz family’s visit.  
  
And so Mikey is left to stare uncomfortably at his knees as he sits alone on their well-worn couch. His dad and Mr. Wentz are in the front yard, talking about lawn maintenance and the best kind of soil to use for when Mr. Wentz and his children will undertake the undertaking of yard-touch-up, while his mom is sitting in the kitchen with Mrs. Wentz and the three Wentz children, sharing tea and cookies and pleasant conversation about the local school and offering advice on the recreational activities they can participate in around town.  
  
Mikey bites his lower lip and wonders if he should join Gerard in his room.  
  
“Hey, Mikey, right?” A loud voice asks, successfully foiling Mikey’s hypothetical escape plan to his brother’s room, which was already half-planned and a guaranteed-success. Mikey looks up and sees the oldest Wentz child standing in the doorway; he’s wearing a fire-engine-red sweatshirt, a beaming smile, and somehow balancing two cups of tea and a plate piled high with chocolate chip cookies in his hands.  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey agrees quietly.  
  
“Cool,” the other boy says. “My name’s Pete Wentz.” He bravely crosses the living room with the tea sloshing in the cups and the cookies clinking around on the plate. He sits down on the couch next to Mikey, passing one of the cups to him, before placing the plate of cookies down on to the coffee table. “I thought I was gonna spill the tea for sure.”  
  
Mikey nods and takes a sip of his tea for a lack of anything to say.  
  
“I like the unicorn,” Pete suddenly says. Mikey jumps a little at the loud voice suddenly cutting through the still silence and meets Pete’s brown eyes. They stare at each other for a moment before Pete’s eyes start crinkling in the corners – the beginnings of a smile flourishing over his face – and he nods down to Mikey’s chest. Mikey glances down as well, and sees the unicorn decorating his otherwise plain, black t-shirt.  
  
“Thanks,” he murmurs, before taking another sip of tea.  
  
“It’d be super cool if unicorns were real, huh?” Pete continues.  
  
Mikey stares down at the rippling, milky-brown of his tea.  
  
“They are real,” he finally mumbles.  
  
“Oh yeah, of course,” Pete agrees easily. Mikey blinks at the non-confrontational tone; his head pops up, and he looks at Pete, expecting to see even just a tiny smidgen of mockery on his face. Instead, Pete is smiling a big smiley smile, exposing the two gaping holes in his teeth and showcasing the full power of his unselfconscious beam.  
  
“The Easter Bunny’s gotta hang out with someone after all,” he continues. “He’s so lucky, getting to hang out with unicorns all day.”  
  
Mikey doesn’t believe in the Easter Bunny at all – who really wants to believe that a human-sized bunny with a weird fixation on eggs is real? – but he nods anyway. “Exactly.”  
  
Pete somehow smiles even bigger, and his eyes sweep over the room. “Oh hey!” He suddenly exclaims. He places his untouched tea onto the coffee table and scrambles toward the television. “You have _Howl’s Moving Castle_! _And_ you have _Spirited Away_!”  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey says.  
  
“Can we watch one of them?”  
  
“Okay,” Mikey agrees.  
  
“Which one do you want, Mikey?” Pete asks, eyes flickering back-and-forth between the two DVDs.  
  
“You can decide,” Mikey offers.  
  
Pete smiles another bright smile. “_Howl’s_ it is! How do you do this?”  
  
Mikey puts down his cup of tea and slithers off the couch. Crawling over towards where the DVD-player is set up, he takes the disc from Pete and slots it into place. Then he presses the on button for the television before crawling back to the couch and slithering onto its plush softness.  
  
Pete bounces onto the couch after him, laughing and clapping as the movie starts.  
  
“I love this movie so much!” He exclaims before grabbing the plate of cookies. “Here, eat a cookie!”  
  
Mikey obediently does so, and decides – through mouthfuls of chocolatey goodness and cookie crumbly delight – that he’s perfectly fine with the way Pete’s toes are pressed against the side of his thigh.  
  
He’s also fine with the way Pete’s toes curl up ticklishly against him every time he laughs and the way Pete’s voice – impishly quoting line after line of dialogue – seems to vibrate up through Mikey.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
It’s a slow-happening, but it takes Mikey a few years to realize that he not only likes Pete and loves Pete, but that he is also _in_ love with Pete.  
  
“Well yeah,” Gerard agrees. Mikey’s frantic confession from the doorway of the basement-converted-to-Gerard’s-bedroom was enough to get Gerard to pull away from his charcoal drawing and spin away from his desk to face his younger brother, and somewhere in the back of his staticky mind, Mikey is grateful for Gerard’s dedication.  
  
“Well _yeah_?” Mikey demands.  
  
“Well _yeah_,” Gerard repeats. He stands up and walks over to his bed before plopping down. He pats the area next to him, smearing charcoal all over the sheets and duvet, and Mikey sits down resignedly. “If you were expecting me to be surprised, Mikey, I don’t know what to tell you. This was always kinda gonna happen, you know? You guys were always kinda inevitable, like two missiles headed towards the same location, or maybe two missiles targeted towards each other. Something like that.”  
  
Mikey breathes out and quashes the anxiety bubbling up in his chest; it’s a common-place feeling, but this time, instead of having absolutely no reason or origin to rear its ugly head, this anxiety is birthed from the very real reality of him being in love with his lovably lovable best friend.  
  
“Okay,” Mikey says with a lot more calmness and surety than he actually feels. “What should I do?”  
  
“Well what do you _want_ to do?” Gerard asks in return.  
  
“Should I tell him?” Mikey asks in return to Gerard’s returned-question, continuing their game of asking ping-pong.  
  
“_I_ think you should tell him,” Gerard finally answers, breaking their streak. “But this doesn’t really have anything to do with me; you should do what you want to do, Mikey. Your feelings, your decision.”  
  
Mikey worries his bottom lip and fidgets with his glasses. Gerard remains uncharacteristically quiet as Mikey tries to work through everything he needs to work through.  
  
“I’m pretty sure he loves me back,” Mikey begins.  
  
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure of that too, Mikes.”   
  
“I’m pretty sure he’s in love with me back,” Mikey continues.  
  
“He’s definitely in love with you back,” Gerard agrees.  
  
“So I should probably tell him.”  
  
“That does seem to be the most reasonable decision,” Gerard nods sagely. His greasy hair nods with him, and some light dandruff drifts down in what Mikey would consider sentient-hair agreement.  
  
“But what if loving each other isn’t enough?” Mikey asks while reaching out and sweeping the dandruff bits off of his brother’s thigh. “What if we love each other, but we suck at this romantic relationship stuff, and then we end up breaking up romantic-wise _and_ friendship-wise?”  
  
“Look Mikey,” Gerard says, reaching out and grabbing both of Mikey’s shoulders. Mikey is distinctly aware that Gerard is rubbing charcoal all over his Nirvana t-shirt, but Gerard is also clearly gearing up to make a big life-changing, mind-altering speech, so Mikey keeps his complaints to himself. “All relationships require a leap-of-faith. A leap-of-faith and a lot of hard work. It’s up to you to decide if this possibility of a romantic relationship with Pete is worth that blind leap. And I can only imagine how fucking scary it is to take that leap, but don’t you think it’s better to give it your all than to give nothing at all and wonder _what if_ for the rest of your life? You don’t wanna sit there and think _I’ll never know_, Mikey. You don’t.”  
  
Mikey blinks at Gerard, and Gerard takes this opportunity to continue impassionedly: “Look, I don’t know if you and Pete will go the distance. But you like him, and you love him, Mikey. You wanna kick his ass in Mario Kart, _and_ you want to hold his hand and gaze into his eyes or whatever. That’s more than what most people can say in their entire lives. And you’re only fourteen, dude. Maybe you don’t have to think that far into the future. Maybe you just need to live in the moment and realize that even if you crash and burn, you’ll at least always have those memories you made with him. And that’s something, isn’t it?”  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey nods quietly.  
  
“Besides, you already got that strong friendship going on,” Gerard leans back with a small smile. “That’s a greater foundation than a lot of people have, stumbling blindly into relationships. At the very least, you already know all of his quirks and eccentricities, and evidently find it all charming instead of annoying.”  
  
Mikey breathes in and out; Gerard’s room smells of Gerard and Gerard smells of grease and charcoal and dirty laundry and home. He absentmindedly wonders what Pete is doing right now and even more absentmindedly wonders if Pete is thinking about him as much as he’s thinking about Pete. Gerard continues rubbing comfort and charcoal into his shoulders.  
  
“Getting into a romantic relationship will completely change our friendship,” Mikey ponders out-loud, not completely not worried.  
  
“Getting into a romantic relationship will definitely change some aspects of your friendship, but I’m pretty sure becoming boyfriends won’t stop you from pushing Pete into swimming pools, or stop Pete from doodling all over your arm literally every single day, or stop you from becoming unnecessarily cruel when it comes to kicking his ass in Mario Kart, or stop him from squirting ketchup all over your fries so he can have them all because he knows that you can’t stand ketchup, or—”  
  
“Thanks, Gee,” Mikey says, pulling away from Gerard with a soft smile.  
  
“Did I break through to you?” Gerard asks teasingly with a gentle grin. He always talks out of one side of his mouth, and Mikey loves his brother, but he refrains from saying it.  
  
“I didn’t know you cared so much about my relationship with Pete,” he playfully settles with instead.  
  
“I didn’t know I cared so much either,” Gerard says, dramatically flopping backwards onto his bed, “until the possibility of you pining away silently instead of just telling him became very real.”  
  
“Thanks, Gee,” Mikey repeats once more with extra sincerity.  
  
Gerard smiles lopsidedly and says “Any time” out of one side of his mouth.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
Sometimes, Mikey completely forgets about his extraordinary, exceptionally astounding, supernaturally astonishing powers.  
  
After all, it’s very rare for a fourteen year old to encounter many dead things.  
  
He’s reminded of his powers in his first year of high school, during grade nine science.  
  
When reaching over the table, his forearm accidentally brushes against the cool, clammy, half-cut-open body of a dissected frog, and the frog – half-dissected and all – bursts into life. It bounces all over the classroom with entrails pouring out of its tiny, once-dead body. Mikey feels a bit sick, and his lab partner definitely feels sick. She heaves and wretches all over the tray that once held their formerly-dead, partially-dissected frog while everyone else in the classroom panics. No one even notices when the class chameleon keels over.  
  
Mikey just breathes in and out; he’s still breathing in a steady rhythm of one, two, three when Gerard pulls him into a comforting hug during lunch time.  
  
“You’re okay,” Gerard says against the shell of his ear.  
  
Mikey just shrugs deeper into his embrace and continues breathing one, two, three, one, two, three.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
Pete is in the middle of doodling No-Face onto Mikey’s forearm – tongue poked out in concentration and nose scrunched up in determination – when Mikey feels something buckling outward in his chest.  
  
“Pete,” he says.  
  
“Mmm?” Pete hums in response. He’s colouring in No-Face’s body with a thick, black sharpie; it’s a gentle tickle against Mikey’s skin, and one that is as familiar as the familiarity of Pete’s face of concentration.  
  
“Pete,” he says once more. “Pete, will you go out with me?”  
  
“Mmm, sure,” Pete says a bit distractedly. “Where to?”  
  
“No,” Mikey shakes his head and places one hand over Pete’s wrist, stopping the movement of his sharpie. Pete looks up in confusion and slight-betrayal, a pout playing on his usual upturned lips. “Will you go out with me?” Mikey repeats more slowly, making sure to add weight to his words.  
  
“Oh,” Pete says. “Oh.” Mikey watches the way Pete’s brown eyes blink rapidly. He likes him, and he loves him, and he’s in love with him, and maybe a leap of faith isn’t that scary when it’s Pete across the canyon. “Really?”  
  
“Really,” Mikey says solemnly. “But only if you want to.”  
  
“I want to,” Pete says with an urgency that Mikey knows to mean that Pete is speaking without thinking it through first. “I really, really, _really_ want to.”  
  
“Yeah?” Mikey asks; a smile is slowly crossing his face, and Pete is already beaming back in response.  
  
“Yeah, Mikeyway,” Pete laughs, and curls up even closer to Mikey. Their limbs are tangled up in the blankets, but they’re tangled up together, and with this confession released into the air, this usual setup suddenly feels all the more enclosed and intimate. “Yeah. But if we do this, there’s no going back. So this is your get-out-of-jail-free card right now; you can back out now with no ill-feelings, but if you don’t—”  
  
“Pete, shut up,” Mikey interrupts with a small grin. “I asked you out, okay? I want to take you out. And then I want to keep taking you out, over and over and over again.”  
  
When Pete laughs, it rumbles up from his chest. The vibrations echo up and down his body, until Mikey – pressed as close as he is to the older boy – pulsates with the physical tangibility of Pete’s happiness.  
  
“I’ll say yes every time you ask me out,” Pete promises fervently, with a vehemence that is only found in fifteen year olds, or anyone who has ever liked, and loved, and been in love with someone else all at once. “Every single time.”  
  
“Good,” Mikey replies. “Now finish up No-Face.”  
  
Pete’s touch is electric, and when he imprints No-Face onto Mikey’s forearm, he also imprints bits and pieces of himself into Mikey’s soul.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
Mikey sometimes wonders if he should tell Pete about his powers. They seem to be a rather integral part of him, and Mikey has never kept anything that actually matters from Pete.  
  
But how does one even go about confessing to a supernatural ability, especially when one’s supernatural ability is as morbid as his is?  
  
“If you keep frowning like that, you’re gonna get wrinkles, you goof.”  
  
Mikey blinks back to reality just as Pete’s fingers begin to gently massage at the crease between his eyebrows, carefully shifting his glasses out of the way. He smiles softly up at his boyfriend, who lets out a rumbling laugh in response. “What’re you thinking, Mikeyway?”  
  
“Nothing,” Mikey responds with a grin. “I was just practicing my resting bitch face.”  
  
“Well you were really nailing it, dude,” Pete giggles. Mikey grabs at Pete’s hand and presses a smiling kiss to the back of it. Pete sighs softly like a kiss on the back of his hand from Mikey is all that he has ever wanted in life. “I think I prefer your smiling face though,” he says, and Mikey kisses up his wrist.  
  
“Okay,” Mikey says and pulls Pete over so the older boy is straddling him. “I’ll smile more,” Mikey promises against the soft edges of Pete’s jawline. “Just for you.”  
  
“Mmm,” Pete laughs his Pete-sweet laugh softly. “You old sappy romantic.”  
  
“Just for you.”  
  
And Mikey forgets about telling Pete all about his extraordinary powers. After all, he rarely encounters dead things anyway. And dead things are frankly the last thing on his mind when Pete is laughing and smiling and warm and alive in his arms.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
Mikey is fifteen when Pete Wentz moves away from him.  
  
“We’re moving,” Pete sobs; his body shakes with it, and Mikey holds on to him as tight as he can, while he can. “We’re moving to Auckland. Motherfucking _Auckland_. What the fuck. Oh my god. _Mikey_, what the hell are we gonna do?”  
  
“Shhh, shhh,” Mikey whispers, moving closer so he’s less humming into the air and more humming into the crease of Pete’s brow. “It’s okay, Pete. It’s gonna be okay. We’ll be okay.” He says it with a confidence he doesn’t feel, but surety and certainty always seem to spill out from him when it’s Pete unraveling before him. He’ll shake and tremble by himself later – right now, he just needs to make sure that Pete’s okay.  
  
After a while, the tears are completely wrung free. The bed no longer quakes with the force of Pete’s sobbing. Instead, he lies there, quiet and still and prone and completely un-Pete-like.  
  
“Baby,” Mikey tries, tired and bruised and desperate for Pete to come back to life.  
  
“Mikeyway,” Pete whispers softly after a while.  
  
“I’m here,” Mikey says. He moves even closer until they’re completely enmeshed together. “I’m here; can you feel me?”  
  
“I feel you,” Pete whispers. His fingers drift up Mikey’s arm, over his shoulder, and come to rest at the pulse-point in his neck. They stroke over the thin skin in a butterfly’s caress, and Mikey tries not to think about how much he’ll miss Pete’s touch, how much he’ll miss _Pete_. “I feel you. Mikey.”  
  
“I love you, Pete,” Mikey says. He brushes a kiss against Pete’s uncharacteristically frowning lips. “We’re going to be fine.”  
  
Pete whimpers against his lips, and Mikey knows his head is going a thousand miles per hour. His mind is a bomb waiting to combust, and Mikey needs to untangle the knots before they’re both swept away in the explosion.  
  
“Auckland is halfway across the world, Mikey,” Pete’s cheeks are wet, and his lips are salty. Mikey loves him. “It’ll take me eighteen hours to fly back here to you.” His face crumples, and Mikey’s chest aches in the way it can only ache when the person you like, and love, and are in love with is crumbling before your eyes. “You’ll forget about me; you’ll stop loving me.”  
  
“Shhh, how can I ever forget about you?” Mikey asks, and the fact that the question needs to be voiced at all leaves him dumbfounded.  
  
Pete sniffles. His brown eyes are bloodshot and weepy, his nose is runny, his cheeks are ruddy and rubbed raw which makes them even ruddier, and he hiccups between every word he words out-loud.  
  
“Promise me you won’t forget about me, Mikeyway,” Pete pleads. “Promise me you’ll always remember me. Even when I am halfway across the world.”  
  
“I’ll never forget you,” Mikey promises with a fervor that can only be found in someone whose heart is breaking, who can see the inevitable end, who knows that this leap of faith is a plummet and a fall and not a soaring glide to safety, but who loves and is loved in return all the same. “I’ll never forget you. I can never forget you.”  
  
“I’ll never forget you either,” Pete promises in return. “I’ll call you, and I’ll text you. I love you. I love you, Mikeyway.”  
  
Their teenage vows remain wrapped up in their hearts and in the cocooned safety of Mikey’s blankets and duvet, and when August comes, Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz III is kissing Michael James Way goodbye.  
  
He’s warm and soft underneath the summer sun, and Mikey will never forget him. He will love him even if he never sees him again, just as he will love him if he saw him every single day for the rest of his life.  
  
“Goodbye, Mikeyway,” Pete smiles his Pete-sweet smile though it’s tremulous and watery and weak. “I love you.”  
  
And then he’s gone, and Mikey’s world is suddenly a bit smaller, a bit colder, a bit less colourful, a bit emptier.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
They try. They really do.  
  
They call, and they text – passionately, desperately, obsessively over the first few weeks. It gets hard though; the distance dulls the edges of their fervor, and the miles stretching out between them cools the passion, if not the love.  
  
The _I love you_ text messages become sparser and sparser until Mikey can’t remember the last time one of them bothered to write it out.  
  
After a while, Mikey forgets the exact way Pete’s laugh rumbles out from him, and he forgets the tiny details of Pete’s face – the freckles and sun marks and crinkles are smoothed out in his mind’s eye, and Pete’s memory is fogged up by a foggy fog, but he doesn’t forget him.  
  
Perhaps he should have promised to never forget the tiniest details of Pete; perhaps he should have tried harder to etch the contours of Pete’s face into his brain; perhaps he should have counted all of Pete’s freckles when he had the chance.  
  
_I miss you_, he writes out, and sends it to Pete for a lack of anything else to send.  
  
There isn’t a reply for a long time, and just as Mikey is heading out the door to school, his phone buzzes.  
  
_I miss you too, Mikeyway_, is all it says.  
  
And Mikey realizes that even though he tried, his mind is still rife with all the _What If’s_ and the _I’ll Never Know’s_.  
  
His chest is buckling inward. He breathes in and out – one, two, three – and feels his chest collapsing inward.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
Mikey is twenty three when he opens up his very own doughnut shop.  
  
“Let’s call it Fat Bottom Doughnuts,” Frank – his business-partner and eternal pain-in-the-ass – suggests with a wide grin.  
  
The two of them are standing in the middle of a half-renovated shop. The smell of paint is still lingering in the air, and there’s a feeling of dust motes dancing throughout the shop that prevails over all else.  
  
Mikey shoots Frank an unimpressed look from the corner of his eye, and Frank – all too used to Mikey’s unimpressed looks – cackles a big, barking, Frank-cackle.  
  
“Okay, okay. How about Nut to These Doughnuts?”  
  
Gerard comes in before Mikey can answer, and Mikey turns toward his older brother in exasperation.  
  
“Gee,” he groans, just as Gerard starts handing out takeout cups of steaming coffee. “Your fiancé is so stupid. Are you sure you wanna marry that? Are you one-hundred percent sure you want to tie yourself to one-hundred percent stupid?”  
  
Frank fakes getting shot and clutches at his heart. “Jesus ouch, man. That was fucking brutal.”  
  
Gerard laughs and leans over to leave a lingering kiss on Frank’s lips. “Honestly Mikey, you tied yourself to Frank as business partners. Somehow that seems like a bigger commitment to me than marriage.”  
  
Frank fakes getting shot again. He scrunches up his face this time for extra effect. “_Baby_, what the hell? Don’t say that while your fiancé is literally standing right next to you.”  
  
“Sorry, fiancé,” Gerard says with a bright laugh. He pecks Frank one more time before pulling away to take a sip of his coffee. He looks over the half-renovated shop with a semi-critical eye and hums in a pleased manner to show how pleased he is.  
  
“Looks nice, boys,” he says. “The windows really make the place feel way bigger. The natural light really opens up the place.”  
  
“Praise the natural light,” Mikey says before adding teasingly: “I never thought the day would come when your vampiric ass enjoys the daylight.”  
  
“Shush,” Gerard laughs as Frank takes an obnoxious sip of his coffee. “I can’t believe you’re gonna be a doughnut-maker, Mikes. I can’t believe the two of you are business-owners, fucking _entrepreneurs_.”  
  
“You’re related to an entrepreneur _and_ you’re gonna marry an entrepreneur, baby,” Frank says, sneaking an arm around Gerard. “I think that technically means you come out on top in this competition.”  
  
“I think I’ll come out on top when you guys actually become _successful_ entrepreneurs,” Gerard says with a fond shake of his head. Mikey smiles over the rim of his cup as he watches them banter; it’s a well-worn song-and-dance, and Mikey finds comfort in the familiarity of the act.  
  
“I’ll make sure to rake in the dough, babe,” Frank laughs with a wink. Suddenly, his eyes widen and he whips around to face Mikey. “Dawn of the Doughnut!”  
  
Mikey’s eyes nearly pop out of his head as he snaps his fingers and points victoriously at Frank.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
Mikey acknowledges that Dawn of the Doughnut isn’t nearly as successful as he would like it to be as he’s getting questioned by a private investigator for being the primary suspect in a murder case.  
  
His slow acknowledgement of the financial failings of Dawn of the Doughnut has absolutely no correlation to do with his being questioned, but it is a thought that has crossed his mind, and once it’s crossed his mind, it is crossed with absolutely no returns or refunds.  
  
Dawn of the Doughnut is undeniably a financial failure.  
  
“Are you listening to me?” The private investigator asks.  
  
Mikey looks up over the rim of his glasses from where he was contemplating his entrepreneurial failures over the tabletop, and blinks at the private investigator sitting across the booth from him.  
  
“Oh yeah, sorry. Did you want some coffee, or maybe some doughnuts? I can ask Frank to grab us some,” Mikey offers in apology.   
  
“No, it’s okay,” the private investigator sighs, and Mikey feels a twinge of guilt.  
  
“I’m sorry, can I get your name again?”  
  
“I’m Ray Toro,” Ray Toro says with a firm nod of his head. His hair nods along with him, and Mikey tips his head towards the both of them.  
  
“Look, I just need—” Ray is interrupted when Frank comes rushing over with a pot of coffee and two cups.  
  
He places the cups down and fills them with coffee, leaning over to ask Mikey in a manner that is not-so-discreet: “What the hell, man? Am I gonna have to bust you out of jail?”  
  
“Hopefully not,” Mikey replies before Ray is clearing his throat across from the two of them.  
  
“Sorry,” Mikey says sheepishly. Frank nudges him over and scoots into the booth next to him, completely ignoring Ray’s indignant splutters.  
  
“I’m sorry, but this is a _private_ conversation,” Ray stresses, and Mikey can forgive him for his naiveté – he doesn’t know Frank, and he doesn’t understand that Frank will do what Frank wants to do; the idea of him bending over for any kind of social convention and nicety is laughably laughable.   
  
“He needs legal representation for whatever he did, doesn’t he?” Frank asks, making himself comfortable in a true, Frank-like fashion.  
  
“Are you a lawyer?” Ray asks.  
  
“Nope,” Frank replies with great impudence. Ray’s hair seems to wilt under such audacity. “But I’m his business partner. And his brother-in-law. Also, we’re like totally broke, so I’m probably the closest he’ll be able to get to legal representation anyway.”  
  
“You’re not my brother-in-law yet,” Mikey corrects.  
  
“Yeah, sorry. Soon-to-be brother-in-law,” Frank corrects in return. Mikey nods in satisfaction.  
  
“Okay, okay, you know what, I don’t care,” Ray finally decides after having stared the two of them down in disbelief. “I just need to know how you killed the guy. You just—you just touched him, and he dropped dead like a pile of bricks. And I saw you, so you can’t get out of this.”  
  
Frank whistles lowly before Mikey can even begin to compose himself.  
  
“Jesus _fuck_, Mikey,” Frank says, slow and deep and with feeling. “You got yourself into some deep shit.”  
  
Mikey breathes in and out – one, two, three, one, two, three – and sighs slowly out from his nose. He’s debating what to do as Frank practically vibrates next to him in a bundle of nerves when he notices the nervous twitch of Ray’s fingers and the genuine belief that he _murdered a man_ shining in his eyes and realizes that there’s really only one way out of this messy, messy, sticky mess.  
  
“Okay,” Mikey breathes out again, before leaning forward, all the while ignoring the way Ray leans back a little. “What I’m about to tell you, I’ve only told two people before. You’ll be the third person to know, and you can’t—you can’t go blabbering, okay?”  
  
“If you’re doing something illegal, I’m going to have to blabber,” Ray points out rather diplomatically. “You understand this, right?”  
  
“Well it’s a good thing I’m not doing anything illegal, then.” Mikey worries his bottom lip for a moment while Frank clutches onto his forearm in equal parts tense tenseness and solid solidarity. “The truth is I can bring people back to life.”  
  
There’s a moment of still silence, before Ray leans back even further, and stares them down in a decidedly unimpressed manner.  
  
“I need you to take this seriously,” is all Ray settles with.  
  
“I am, I _am_, I promise,” Mikey says, before sighing and pushing Frank gently towards the kitchen. "Can you bring me the bag of rotten apples?”  
  
“Jesus _fuck_,” Frank proclaims again with passion but obediently scoots out and scuttles towards the kitchen, tossing nervous glances over his shoulder the whole while.  
  
“I know this sounds fucking insane; I _know_ it does,” Mikey says solemnly. “But it’s the truth. It’s complicated, and I can’t explain why I have this ability, but I do.” Ray genuinely looks like he’s going to bolt and call the cops on him, and Mikey pleads, “I can prove it. Just stay for a moment. Please.”  
  
Ray takes a wavering breath, but settles back down. Mikey breathes out and says a quiet but grateful, “Thank you.”  
  
When Frank returns with the bag of rotten apples, the booth is tense and terse and chilly. Frank sets the bag down onto the tabletop, and settles down beside Mikey again. The lines of their bodies are deliberately pressed together, and Mikey is grateful for the tangible support from Frank.  
  
“Okay, okay,” Mikey says. “Just—just look at this.”  
  
He reaches out, and touches one finger against the rotten flesh of one of the apples. Right before their eyes, the rotten flesh seems to sew itself back together; the decomposing skin of the apple smoothens out, and a ripe redness paints itself over the fruit in something that is definitively magical.  
  
“Jesus, Mikey,” Frank breathes out in wonderment from beside him. Mikey isn’t looking at him, however. Instead, his gaze is trained onto Ray, who gapes down at the now-fresh fruit.  
  
“What the _hell_?” The private investigator whispers out.  
  
“I can—I…look,” Mikey reaches out and touches another one of the rotten apples. The same thing happens, and before anyone knows, there are two perfectly fresh, perfectly red, perfectly juicy, perfectly perfect apples sitting on the tabletop of their shared booth.

“It’s complicated,” Mikey says, solemn and true and honest, as Ray reaches out and holds the two apples in his hands. “But from what I figured out, when I touch something that’s dead, it’ll come back to life. When I touch it again, it’ll die—for real this time though. If I touch it again, it’ll die and remain dead forever. However,” and here, Mikey’s breathing becomes shuddery. Frank grasps his hand and squeezes hard. “However, if I bring something back to life and fail to kill it again within sixty seconds, something in the vicinity will die in exchange for its newfound life.”  
  
“…_what_?” Ray splutters out.  
  
“The two things have to be fairly equal in life value though,” Mikey continues without pause. “A human for a human, an animal for an animal, a plant for a plant. I brought these two apples back to life; that means that somewhere around this vicinity, two plants or fruits just died in exchange for their return.”  
  
“I—” Ray falls back against his seat. “How is this possible?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Mikey says, shrugging and equally as confused as Ray. “I don’t know why I have these powers. I just do.”  
  
“You gotta believe him, man,” Frank bursts out. His nails are digging into Mikey’s forearm, but Mikey can’t bring himself to dislodge him. He can feel the apprehension bleeding off of Frank, and the physicality of his touch grounds him perfectly in the terrible here and now. “He has no reason to lie about this shit.”  
  
“I…I believe him,” Ray finally says after a long, drawn-out moment. Frank tumbles back against the booth like a puppet cut loose, and Mikey heaves out a sigh of relief. “How…how large is this vicinity you mentioned?”  
  
“I’m not actually sure,” Mikey confesses. “I’m pretty sure it has to be fairly nearby for—for the _exchange_ to occur, but I’m not sure of the exact perimeter.”  
  
“So, the guy you touched was actually already dead,” Ray says slowly as if he’s sounding out every syllable before letting it pass through his lips.  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey says. “He was lying in the back-alley, and I just wanted to make sure he was okay. Turned out he was already dead and I brought him back to life, so I had to chase him down and touch him before the minute was up.”  
  
“Or someone else would have died in exchange for his life,” Ray finishes the dark and morbid thought. His hair is completely wilted at this point, as if the morbid morbidity of this morbid situation is also weighing down its natural luscious state.   
  
“Yeah,” is all that Mikey can say.  
  
There’s another long, stretched-out moment of silence before Ray pipes up meekly, “I think—I think I need that doughnut now, please.”  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
Mikey has a voicemail that Pete left him years ago still saved onto his phone.  
  
There’s still a childlike quality to Pete’s boisterous voice despite the fact that it’s distinctively deeper than he remembers from his childhood, and slurred in a way that indicates teenage insobriety, and staticky from the fact that Pete is actually miles, and miles, and miles away from him.  
  
“_Mikey! Mikey—Mikeyway. I’m eighteen now. Whoo! I—fuck, we’re really getting older now, huh? I can vote now, dude. I can vote, and I can get married. I can do fucking—fucking anything, man. Mikey. Mikeyway, Mikeyway, Mikeyway. Why aren’t you here with me, Mikeyway? I’m eighteen now; you should be here with me. Why aren’t you here with me? I made a wish, you know. I blew out my candles and I made a wish, and my wish was you. But you—fuck, it didn’t work. Mikeyway. Do you still think about me? I think about you. All the time. Fucking all day, every day, everywhere. I think about you, and I think: God, this can’t be real. How can this be real? Mikeyway. How can you be real? How can this be real? How can this be real, Mikey? Do you still love me? I think I still love you. Maybe. I just—you should be here with me. It’d be so much better if you were here with me. Because I wished for you, Mikey. I wished for you, and you should be with me. Mikey—Mikeyway. How are we gonna get out of this one, Mikey? Mikey—Mikeyway—_”  
  
Mikey still listens to the message some days. When the _What If’s_ and the _I’ll Never Know’s_ get too loud in his head, and the measured distance measured out between the two of them through space and time seems too much of a gaping chasm to ever make that leap again, if the opportunity to make that leap again should ever arise at all.  
  
Listening to the voicemail doesn’t dull down the throb that echoes in Mikey’s head; if anything, it makes it worse. But he can’t stop. He can’t delete it either. It’s probably some sort of fixation, the kind that he and his therapist have been slowly trying to untangle and undo.  
  
But, at the same time, Pete doesn’t feel like a fixated fixation. He feels like a boy with a sweet-quality smile, skinned knees, and sharpie-tinged fingers. He doesn’t feel like a regret, or like a chapter closed.  
  
He just feels the way he’s always made Mikey feel.  
  
All Mikey knows is that the two of them can be missiles headed towards each other on a collision course or two ships passing each other in the night, but Pete is Pete, and Mikey is Mikey because of the way he once held Pete in his arms and was held back in return.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
“I have a proposition for you,” Ray says after they’ve consumed approximately fourteen doughnuts and twenty-two cups of coffee between the three of them.  
  
“Look, we really are in some deep-shit, financially-speaking,” Frank says through the powdered sugar powdered all over his lips, “but we’re not _that_ desperate yet. Our bodies are our's until we seriously can’t handle this anymore.”  
  
“What? What—no, _no_. That’s not what I—_no_. I am _married_,” Ray says, flashing the platinum gold band encasing his left ring finger.  
  
“Oh, congratulations, man!” Frank beams at the other man across the table. Mikey takes a slow and deliberate sip of his coffee; his heartbeat is still thundering in his chest, and the ridiculous amounts of coffee he has consumed cannot be good for him, but he needs it. “Is married life as great as it seems?”  
  
“It’s pretty good,” Ray nods. “I can’t complain. But—okay, _stop_ distracting me.” He takes a deep breath and leans over, all serious and business-like. “Look, you can reject this proposal if you want. I’m not going to force you to do anything you don’t want to do. But your powers can be really helpful when it comes to solving cases. My proposition is this: You’ll help me, and act as my partner. You can bring people back to life, ask them questions within sixty seconds, and then put them back down before the time limit is up. We can help a lot of people and their family’s this way, _and_ I’ll split the reward money with you.”  
  
Mikey takes a sip of his coffee; his mind is made up of static, and Ray is looking imploringly at him while Frank is licking the powdered sugar off of his fingers.  
  
“What do you say?” Ray asks, after a considerable length of silence.  
  
Mikey breathes in and out – one, two, three, one, two, three.  
  
“Yeah, okay,” he says with a slow nod of his head. “I’m in.”  
  
A wide smile overtakes Ray’s face, and the pale pallor that had taken up residence on his features recedes a little. His hair also begins perking back up in a decidedly hopefully perky manner.  
  
“Seriously?” He asks.  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey solemnly nods. And that’s that.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
When Mikey is feeling particularly morbid, he wonders if his extraordinary powers would prove to be detrimental when it comes to his own passing.  
  
Perhaps his tampering with the scales of life and death would bar him from any truly peaceful rest at the end of his days, if a truly peaceful rest is what truly awaits people at the end of their days.  
  
“Bullshit,” Gerard – greasy, and uncombed, and twenty-one, and brimming with love for his baby brother – ferociously says out of one corner of his mouth. He pulls the duvet more tightly over the two of them; faint Christmas music is playing from the living room, but – barred in Gerard’s basement-converted-into-a-bedroom and hidden under the musty blankets in his even mustier bed – the reality of the world seems to fall onto the wayside.  
  
“You’re the best person I know, Mikey. You deserve fucking everything. And if there’s any justice in the world, you’re gonna get it.”  
  
“Maybe,” Mikey murmurs.  
  
“No,” Gerard says. He’s warm against Mikey, and Mikey curls up tighter against his older brother. “No _maybe_. You’re gonna be okay, Mikey. I’m gonna make sure of it.”  
  
And Mikey – who isn’t that sure of anything but has always been sure of Gerard – simply says, “I believe you.”  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
Gerard isn’t that sure of it at first, but Mikey’s confident and quiet, “Maybe I was given these powers for a reason, Gee” stops the protests from leaving his lips.  
  
“If this Ray fellow screws you over, I’m gonna—I’m gonna—” Gerard pauses, and Mikey waits patiently for Gerard to come up with a suitable threat. “I’m gonna sic Frankie on him.”  
  
“Frank _is _much more terrifying than you,” Mikey concedes with a nod before smiling softly. “But I think he’s already pretty fond of Ray, so it’s gonna take a bit of convincing on your part.”  
  
“I can be _very_ convincing,” Gerard says seriously in a very serious manner.  
  
“Yes,” Mikey agrees. “I _have_ seen the red chemise in your closet.”  
  
“And that’s not even my sexiest chemise,” Gerard says, and Mikey laughs, pushing gently at his older brother’s shoulders. Gerard – giggly and malleable – falls against the couch cushions and throws his feet over Mikey’s lap.  
  
Mikey gently begins massaging Gerard’s socked feet.  
  
“Are you really sure about this?” Gerard asks after a comfortable silence.  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey replies. His fingers never pause in pressing and rubbing against the plains and curves of Gerard’s soles.  
  
“Okay,” Gerard says. He reaches out and places a warm and clammy hand on Mikey’s wrist. “I’m in your corner, Mikey. Always.”  
  
Mikey lets himself smile quietly.  
  
“I know.”  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
Mikey is twenty-six when he sees Pete, really sees Pete – outside of the foggy fog of his mind’s eye – again.  
  
“Alright, so the cops are pretty sure that this is a clean-cut suicide,” Ray says, perusing and shuffling through the many, many leafs of paper, “but his friends and family aren’t quite as certain. This is where we come in.”  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey says. He’s standing over the counter, wiping down the already-clean surface with a washcloth to make sure that it’s even cleaner than its already clean state, while Frank is noisily bustling around in the kitchen.  
  
“He’s pretty young, twenty-seven,” Ray continues. His cup of coffee is cooling at his elbow, but he’s too immersed in all the documents spread out before him to pay his caffeinated drink much attention. “He runs an animal shelter, and works part-time as a soccer coach.” Ray tsks and continues, "He also does have a history of depression and anxiety, but—we still have to make sure.”  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey says.  
  
Ray takes a sip of his coffee before saying, “His name sure is a mouthful though.”  
  
“What is it?” Mikey asks, less out of genuine curiosity and more out of politeness.  
  
“Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz III,” Ray replies nonchalantly.  
  
And something shatters in Mikey’s world – something foundational, and all-encompassing, and irreplaceable. The gaping chasm that separates Mikey and Pete suddenly becomes all the deeper and darker, and the measured out distance measured out between the two of them through space and time suddenly becomes immeasurable.  
  
“_How can this be real_?” Pete asks, young, and drunk, and staticky. “_How can this be real_?”  
  
Something like a gasp rips its way out of Mikey, shuddery, and broken, and rubbed raw, and busted open at the nerve-ends.  
  
“_Do you still think about me_?” Pete asks, sweet, and slurred, and alive, and half-the-world away from Mikey.  
  
“_I think about you_,” Pete confesses. “_All the time. Fucking all day, every day, everywhere_.”  
  
Ray is reaching for him, panic evident in his wide eyes, and Frank is bursting out through the kitchen doors, but all Mikey can hear is Pete’s voice – young, and drunk, and staticky – and _dead_.  
  
“_I think I still love you. I think I still love you. I think I still love you_.”  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
“Mikey? Mikey!” Gerard is leaning over him; tears are beading in the corners of his eyes, like back when he was seven and they had just discovered Charlotte, prone, and cold, and quiet, and dead in her cage. He has a smudge of night-time-sky blue splattered over the left side of his pale face, and he’s chanting “Mikey, Mikey, oh please, Mikey” with increasing urgency.  
  
Mikey can’t breathe—he can’t fucking _breathe_. One, two, three, one, two, three, and it’s stuck.  
  
“He’s gone,” Mikey rasps out. “Oh god, Gee. He’s _gone_.”  
  
Gerard just gathers him in his arms, and Mikey shudders and curls into himself. Frank is running around, grabbing blankets and tea and biting his nails in between his frantic rushing around, and Ray is talking to someone on his phone in a rushed and severe manner in the corner of the room. Mikey closes his eyes, and all he can see is a Spider-man band-aid and eternally skinned knees.  
  
“He’s gone, he’s gone, _please_.” Mikey crumples with it.  
  
Gerard’s warm tears hit the curve of Mikey’s neck, and Mikey wishes he had just taken one last leap of faith, just one more.  
  
“He’s _gone_. Oh _god_.”  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
When Mikey is nine and Gerard is twelve, they get accosted by a few boys from Gerard’s grade.  
  
“Hey, loser,” one of them says and pushes Gerard, hard. Gerard flails and almost falls over. He manages to catch himself at the last second, but his eyes are trained on to the ground, and Mikey can see the way his arms tremble and the way his fingers are shaking from where they’re clutched, paper-white, onto the straps of his Batman backpack.  
  
“Leave him alone,” Mikey says. He’s scared, but he loves his brother more than he’s afraid of these looming boys, and he does his best to look bigger than he really is.  
  
The boys glance down at Mikey, before scoffing sardonically and rounding onto Gerard again.  
  
“You need your baby brother to protect you, Gerard?” The one who pushed Gerard says, and he leers in a way that causes the hair on Mikey’s arms to stand on end. “What are you, a little girl? Are you a little girl, Gerard? Huh?”  
  
“I said leave him alone!” Mikey yells, louder and yellier than he has ever yelled in his life, and reaches out to push the bully away. The older boy barely budges, and the next thing Mikey knows, a big, meaty hand is smacking against his chest, and he’s falling down.  
  
He yelps when his hands scrape against the rocky concrete. He can hear the bullies laughing and Gerard frantically shouting “Mikey!” but it’s hard to concentrate on anything other than the flaring pain blossoming on the fleshy part of his palms.  
  
The bullies turn away back towards Gerard, but before they can do anything, a soccer ball is launching through the air and smacking the back of the bully leader’s head with a very precise precision and leaving behind a satisfyingly satisfying smacking sound.  
  
The boy yelps, and all of them – the gang of bullies, Gerard, and Mikey – turn in unison to see Pete standing a few meters away from them. There’s an uncharacteristic scowl twisting his lips, and the rough and tough pose he’s adopted is only undercut a little bit by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles band-aid he has taped on his right cheek and by how utterly tiny he looks, with his feet planted firmly on the ground and his hands planted even more firmly on his skinny hips.  
  
“Leave them alone, Philip,” Pete says, sounding as grave and as severe as a ten year old can sound.  
  
“Butt out of this, Pete,” The main bully – Philip, apparently – scowls back.  
  
Pete marches forward, and plants himself firmly between Gerard and Mikey, and the gang of looming boys.  
  
“You’re a big, mean idiot, you know that?” Pete says, completely unphased by the glower on Philip’s face. “If you don’t leave them alone, I’m gonna tell your mom what you’ve been up to. I’m sure she’ll be happy to hear about how her son is one big, mean idiot. And I’ll even tell coach what you’ve been doing, and then you’ll get benched forever, and you’ll never get to play soccer again.”  
  
Philip glares harder. “You’re a little rat, Wentz.”  
  
Pete scoffs and leans down to pull Mikey up by the wrists. His touch is careful and gentle, and he grabs Gerard by the hand as well before pulling the Brothers Way along behind him. He uses his feet to navigate the soccer ball in front of him, and he says, “At least I’m not a big, mean idiot, idiot” over his shoulder.  
  
Pete silently marches them all the way back to Mikey and Gerard’s home before he’s dropping their wrists and hands at the front steps.  
  
“Are you guys okay?” He asks. The scowl is gone from his face, but his lips are twisted up in a concerned frown, and worry flickers in his round, brown eyes.  
  
“Yeah—I,” Gerard pauses and says very sincerely, “Thank you, Pete.”  
  
“No worries,” Pete smiles his usual Pete-sweet smile, but this time it’s marred by a tentative and hesitant apprehension. He reaches out for Mikey’s hands and gently turns them around. The cradle of his palms is hot and cozy, but Mikey can’t help the whimper that escapes his lips at the quiet sting of his scrapes. Pete gently rubs the back of his hands in a comforting gesture before letting go. Mikey’s hands feel a little colder at the loss of Pete’s touch.  
  
“I’m gonna go grab some stuff to clean up your hands,” Pete says, gesturing towards his own home, separated only by their shared lawn. “I’ll also grab you some band-aids. What kind do you want, Mikeyway?” Pete asks, kindly. “I’ve got Superman ones, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle ones, and I also got SpongeBob ones, and Astro Boy ones.”  
  
“Astro Boy,” Mikey sniffles.  
  
Pete smiles softly, and his eyes crinkle with it. “Astro Boy band-aids for Mikeyway coming right up.”  
  
He rushes over to his house, and Gerard gathers Mikey up in a hug as they wait for him to return.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
Pete’s body is resting in a funeral home. Last Journey Services, Ray tells him. Mikey laughs through a sob, or maybe he sobs through a laugh, or maybe he does something that’s a cross between the two.  
  
He puts on his best suit and pins a Stormtrooper lapel pin into place, because he thinks Pete might appreciate it. He makes sure his cropped-short, dyed-black hair looks acceptable, and he does his best to mask the fact that his crying eyes have been crying for hours, which morphed into the days that were comprised of the hours spent crying.  
  
Gerard presses a soft kiss to his cheek while Frank looks uncharacteristically somber as the two of them wave Mikey and Ray off.  
  
Last Journey Services is a very tiny and very homey-looking funeral home. It actually is a converted house, and the walls are painted a gentle and soothing-looking yellow. Mikey spends the few minutes it takes Ray to talk to the coarse, smoky, and vaguely rude funeral home director staring at the white trimmings of the ceiling and doing his upmost best to breathe.  
  
Ray’s gentle hand on his back causes him to jump, and he meets Ray’s concerned eyes with a brokenly stoic and a stoically broken expression in return.  
  
“Are you ready?” Ray asks.  
  
“_Do you still love me_?” Pete asks.  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey replies.  
  
They’re led to a private room in the back by the funeral home director who stomps away after leading them there.  
  
“I’ll be outside,” Ray says kindly. “Take your time, okay? Just—whenever you’re ready.”  
  
“Okay,” Mikey says, and then he’s pushing the door open, and entering the room.  
  
Mikey presses his back against the closed door, and he takes in the tiny room. The small, enclosed space is taken over mainly by a gleaming white casket. The top is closed, and the natural light filters in through the cracks of the curtain, setting the bone-white casket aflame. Mikey shudders and takes one, two, three, four, five, six steps, and he’s standing right beside the casket.  
  
His fingers brush against the cool marble, and then he’s lifting up the top.  
  
And then he’s gazing down at Pete.  
  
And it’s surreal, because Pete is eternally nine years old, and ten, and eleven, and twelve, and thirteen, and fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen years old in his mind. Pete always has skinned knees, and he always has cartoon-band-aids taped all over his face; his fingers are always smeared with the black marker of his black sharpies, and he’s always animated, and laughing, and crying, and screaming, and whispering, and _alive_.  
  
His very own Peter Pan – eternally youthful, eternally alive.  
  
The face that he stares down at is undeniably Pete’s though, even if he’s no longer the eternal youth that dances through Mikey’s foggy, fogged-up memories.  
  
Even in his still and silent form, Mikey can see the gentle wrinkles that have begun to form at the corners of Pete’s eyes from constantly laughing and always smiling his Pete-sweet smile. It’s in this moment that it hits Mikey hard: He never got to see those changes occur; he never got to see the way those barking laughs and sweet, sweet smiles left creases on Pete’s face as a memorabilia of the physicality of Pete’s happiness, as proof of the life he’s lived.  
  
And now he’s gone, and the changes will stop forever, and Mikey’s missed eleven years of changes, and he’ll never get to see another change again.  
  
He backs up – one, two, three, four, five, six steps – until his back is pressed against the door once more. He slumps down, a marionette with its strings cut, and tries to breathe through the gasping heaves that rattle through his chest.  
  
It feels like hours when Mikey can finally bring himself to stand up again and take those six steps back to Pete’s side.  
  
This is one of the last two times he’ll ever get to touch Pete again. He’ll never get to tether himself to Pete again by the press of their palms and the connection of their fingertips; he’ll never feel the curl of Pete’s toes underneath his thighs again; he’ll never get to feel the gentle press of Pete’s smiling lips against his own, and he’ll never again feel the butterfly touch of Pete’s fingers as it glides over his pulse-points; he’s lost the warmth and safe cradle of Pete’s hands forever now.  
  
He hesitates and tenderly cups Pete’s cheek for a quick semi-second before pulling away.  
  
It’s electric.  
  
Pete’s eyes snap open, and he gasps, big and loud and wet. Mikey immediately backs away until he’s pressed once more against the door, and he watches as Pete snaps into sitting position before scrambling out of the coffin.  
  
“What—where am I? Who—?” Pete turns around in a circle, glancing about frantically. Mikey does his best to memorize the deep reverberation of Pete’s voice so he’ll never forget it. Pete finally spins around and sees Mikey. “What happened? Where am—?” He pauses, and his eyes flicker frantically over Mikey’s face, before his expression falls slack. “Mikey? _Mikeyway_?”  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey breathes out.  
  
Pete gapes for half-a-second before his familiar Pete-sweet smile overtakes his face, and he’s rushing towards Mikey. “Mikeyway!”  
  
“Wait!” Mikey cries out and presses himself even further against the door. Pete pauses, four steps away from Mikey. “Don’t come any closer.”  
  
Pete’s arms drop limply to his sides and a pained expression flashes quick as lightning over his face. “Mikey?”  
  
Mikey breathes in and remembers _sixty seconds_.  
  
“Do you remember what happened?”  
  
“I—I had the weirdest dream that I was killed, but then I woke up and—and you’re here.”  
  
“Actually, that did happen,” Mikey says in a rush. “You did die, and you only have less than sixty seconds before you’re going to have to die again. I’m sorry.”  
  
Pete blinks at him. His arms wrap around himself, and Mikey aches to hold him. “Oh.”  
  
“Can you tell me what happened?” Mikey asks, and he rubs his hands up and down his biceps in a meek consolation. “I’ll make sure whoever did this to you ends up behind bars, but I need you to try to remember.”  
  
Pete breathes in a shaky breath. “The team I coach had a game out of town. It was nighttime, and I was at the hotel we were staying at. I went to the ice machine to grab some ice, and before I knew it, someone was strangling me from behind with a plastic bag.”  
  
“Okay,” Mikey says and then winces, because nothing about this is okay. “I’m sorry.”  
  
Pete shrugs. “It’s not your fault.” His eyes flicker down, and a tentative smile crosses his face; the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes wrinkle in even further, and Mikey feels the pinprick of tears begin to form at his eyes. Pete tilts his head towards Mikey’s chest. “I like your Stormtrooper pin.”  
  
Mikey glances down at his Stormtrooper lapel pin and lets out a watery laugh.  
  
“I thought you might.”  
  
“I missed you,” Pete says in a sudden rush, and Mikey watches the way Pete’s face crumples a bit before he smiles bravely once more. “If I have to die again, I’m glad I got to see you one last time, Mikeyway.”  
  
“I really missed you too,” Mikey confesses. “I—”  
  
A sudden rapping against the door sounds, and Ray’s voice echoes urgently through the mahogany.  
  
“Mikey, _soon_.”  
  
Pete’s eyes flicker to the door before flickering back to meet Mikey’s. He smiles tremulously.  
  
“Is it time?”  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey says. He takes one step forward until they’re separated by only three steps. “I’ll miss you. I’ll never forget you,” he promises.  
  
Pete’s smile wavers at the edges, but his eyes are bright with something that’s more than just tears. “I’ll never forget you either, Mikeyway.”  
  
Mikey takes another two steps, until the measured distance measured out between the two of them can be counted down to just one step.  
  
“Can you hold me, please?” Pete implores softly. “If I have to—if I have to go. Please?”  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey says, and he reaches out.  
  
And then he stops. Pete closes his eyes, and he’s tilted towards him, arms reached out in return, and Mikey can’t do it; he can’t fucking do it.  
  
“Mikeyway,” Pete breathes out, and his eyes are pressed closed tightly enough that the wrinkles that have blossomed near the corners of his eyes remain curling outwards.  
  
Ray begins knocking the door again, this time more frantically and more insistently than before.  
  
“Mikey!” Ray hisses. “Mikey, _time_!”  
  
“I can’t,” Mikey croaks out. Pete’s eyes flutter open – a look of confusion fluttering over his face – and Mikey pulls away until he’s four steps away from Pete again.  
  
“Mikey!” Ray shouts.  
  
“I can’t,” Mikey repeats hoarsely, and he can’t look away from Pete. Pete’s arms wrap around himself again, and his wide, brown eyes flicker rapidly between Mikey’s even more rapidly paling face, and the heavy thickness of the thick, heavy mahogany door. He looks _alive_; he _is_ alive; he’s alive, and Mikey wants to take that leap of faith one last time, even if maybe he wasn’t meant to take that leap of faith ever again.  
  
“Shit, Jesus—_shit,_” Mikey hears Ray curse out loud, before rapid footsteps are thundering away.  
  
“What’s going on?” Pete asks, and he tentatively moves closer to Mikey.  
  
“Don’t—don’t come any closer,” Mikey says. “Just—you can’t touch me, okay? We can’t have any skin-on-skin contact or—or you’re going to die again. So you need to just—just keep a distance from me.”  
  
“Mikeyway,” Pete whimpers. He looks scared, and Mikey is sorrier than he’s ever been sorry in his entire sorry life.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Mikey whispers, and he does his best to not think about who has to die for Pete to live. “Fuck—just, just come with me. But—but be careful.”  
  
Mikey walks out of the room, and he hears Pete follow him. When he looks back, Pete is already looking back at him. They’re separated by something that’s not unlike the six steps that first kept them away from each other in that tiny, private room, when Pete was lying in a bone-white casket, and Mikey was roughly hollowed out.  
  
“Mikeyway,” Pete whispers.  
  
“I’m here,” Mikey says. He keeps the measured out distance of a careful six steps between them. “I’m here.”  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
Ray eventually returns to his car. By that point, Mikey and Pete have sequestered themselves in his silver Sedan with Mikey sitting in the passenger seat and Pete taking up residence in one of the backseats.  
  
Ray pulls open the driver-side door and slides into the seat behind the wheel. There’s a moment of suspended silence before Ray lets out a quietly even, “What did you do, Mikey?”  
  
Mikey feels sick. His fingers are trembling and his entire body is shivering from it. When he looks into the rearview mirror, his eyes meet Pete’s blown-wide ones; he can see the wrinkles edging around his brown eyes, and he thinks about how much he doesn’t know and how much he wants to know, and he tries not to hate himself too much.  
  
“I couldn’t,” Mikey whispers. “I couldn’t do it.”  
  
“Oh, Mikey,” Ray says. It’s a kindness when he reaches over to gather Mikey into a half-hug, and Mikey hides his face in the crook of Ray’s neck.  
  
The three of them sit there in Ray’s car – even if maybe one of them wasn’t supposed to be sitting in any car ever again – until Mikey stops trembling like a leaf.  
  
Only then does Ray pull out of the tight driveway of Last Journey Services and begins the drive back to Gerard and Frank’s studio apartment.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
“Oh Mikey,” Gerard says when he opens the door.  
  
“I’m damned,” is all Mikey says in response. “Really now.”  
  
“Shut up,” Gerard breathes out vehemently, and then he’s pulling Mikey into another hug. His long fingers lay there splayed over Mikey’s back, and his breath is hot and clammy against the shell of Mikey’s ear. “You’re not, you’re _not_.”  
  
And Mikey – who can’t bring himself to believe Gerard in this regard anymore – can only say, “Okay.”  
  
Then Gerard is pulling away and pulling a semi-shell-shocked Pete into a tight and desperate embrace, and Mikey is pushing his way past a concerned Frank into the bathroom, where he heaves and wretches over their toilet bowl while Pete gets to breathe and live and stand in the doorway of Gerard and Frank’s studio apartment, and someone else in the world has to remain dead to make that miracle happen.  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
“I thought I might find you here.”  
  
Mikey looks up from his issue of _All-Star Superman_ and peers through his glasses at Pete’s tentatively smiling face.  
  
“Congratulations,” Mikey says shortly before pressing his nose back into the glossy, colourful pages depicting Smallville and bearing the blue, and red, and yellow banner of Superman.  
  
One of Pete’s warm hands presses against his stomach and sneaks its way up to rest against his chest, while the other one wraps itself around the curled-inward shape of Mikey’s curled-up back. He presses his cheek against the bony contours of Mikey’s shoulder and quietly lets Mikey leaf through his copy of _All-Star Superman_ for a few more minutes before speaking up.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he says, and Mikey grunts in acknowledgement but never lets his eyes stray away from the good deeds of Clark Kent. “I just don’t think sometimes. I was an ass, and I’m sorry.”  
  
“You don’t think all the time, and you were definitely an ass,” Mikey snipes back, flinty and irritated, and feeling a bit too heated under the collar to simply let Pete slide his way back into his good graces with his graceful steps and sweet, sweet smiles.  
  
“Forgive me, please?” Mikey feels Pete press a gentle kiss against his shoulder. “I’ll buy you any comic book you want.”  
  
“You can’t afford the comic books I want.”  
  
“I’ll buy you a hamburger and a soda,” Pete offers instead.  
  
Mikey sighs and places the comic back onto the shelf. “You were a complete asshole, you know that?” He finally meets Pete’s eyes and frowns down at his boyfriend’s face.  
  
“I know,” Pete nods solemnly. “I’ll do my best to be better, promise.”  
  
Mikey lets his frown gentle out a little and leans down to press a chaste but firm kiss against Pete’s lips. Pete has to lean up on his tip-toes, and – despite himself – Mikey is already feeling a little less angry.  
  
“I think I’ll take that hamburger and soda now,” Mikey says when they pull apart.  
  
Pete smiles, sweet and soft.  
  
“Are you still angry with me?” He asks later, over half-eaten burgers, greasy onion rings and fries, and twin sodas. Mikey’s legs are twined with his under the table, and the question feels a little bit redundant in the face of how closely they’re pressed together, separated as they are by the tabletop.  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey simply says, and he snags one of Pete’s onion rings.  
  
Pete’s eyes shutter a bit. “Do you still love me?” He asks through a dimmed down smile.  
  
Mikey rolls his eyes and leans over the table. He presses a salty kiss to Pete’s equally-salty mouth and relishes the slow smile spreading over Pete’s face and against his lips.  
  
“Yeah, you idiot,” Mikey says. “I still love you.”  
  
  
-x-  
  
  
Pete is curled up on Gerard and Frank’s couch; he’s wearing one of Frank’s Ramones sweaters, dressed up in Gerard’s paint-splattered sweatpants – with the hems rolled up to accommodate his smaller stature – and absentmindedly flipping through Gerard’s well-loved copy of _The Little Prince_.  
  
He’s pale, and shaken-looking, with red-rimmed eyes, and rubbed-raw cheeks.  
  
Mikey can’t look away from him.  
  
Pete looks up after a bit. A tired smile stretches over his face.  
  
“What’re you looking at, Mikeyway?” He asks, placing the copy of _The Little Prince_ down onto the scruffy and scruffed-up surface of Gerard and Frank’s scruffy coffee table.  
  
Mikey shrugs and feels the hard wood of the door’s doorway rub against the ridges of his spine. “Nothing,” he says and then immediately follows it up with “You”, because Pete is anything but nothing, and there’s nothing right now except for Pete.  
  
Pete’s lips quirk up a bit more, and he glances down at the vibrant red and dulled down green of his knees before glancing up once more to meet Mikey’s eyes. “Sit with me?”  
  
Mikey walks into the room and sits down on the other end of the couch. He makes sure to keep as big of a distance as possible between himself and Pete.  
  
“I can’t believe I died,” Pete says without preamble. Mikey looks at him, but this time Pete is looking away; he’s looking outside into the foggy night sky with his back turned to Mikey. The straightened edges of his black hair rests against the nape of his neck, and his shoulders are wider than Mikey remembers. “I can’t believe you brought me back to life.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Mikey says, because he is, because he’ll always be sorry for the rest of his life.  
  
“Don’t—don’t be,” Pete says, turning around to meet Mikey’s eyes. He’s no longer smiling; he just looks exhausted. Mikey looks at him and just _wishes_. “I just wish I can tell my friends and family that I’m okay, you know?”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Mikey repeats once more. “Maybe we can—we’ll figure something out.”  
  
There’s a moment of silence.  
  
“Dying—dying was really scary,” Pete says. His gaze is trained onto the floor, and – in this moment – the distance between them is countable and immeasurable in equal parts. Pete lets out a watery laugh, and Mikey has to physically restrain himself from reaching out to just _hold_ him. “Dying sucked ass,” Pete sniffles and lets out a soft hiccup. “But being dead wasn’t that bad.”  
  
“What was it like?” Mikey asks in a whisper.  
  
“It was like being asleep,” Pete replies. “But, like, with less dreams about flying cars and pelting coconuts.”  
  
Mikey laughs into the crook of his arm, and a tiny version of his Pete-sweet smile crosses over Pete’s sweet face.  
  
“What did it feel like when I brought you back?” Mikey asks after a moment.  
  
Pete pauses as he contemplates his answer; his eyes flicker over and around Mikey’s face, and Mikey hopes he can find what he needs there. After a while, Pete says slowly, “It felt like being yanked out of the water after having been under for too long. Only you didn’t realize that you were under for that long, so your lungs are burning, and your head is filled with fuzz, and the oxygen you’re breathing in hurts and _burns_ at first. But then your eyes adjust, and you’re just glad that someone noticed that you were under for that long. You’re just glad to come back up for air.”  
  
Mikey bites his bottom lip and tries not to cry.  
  
“How about you?” Pete asks through a thick-sounding voice. “What did it feel like, bringing me back?”  
  
And how can Mikey even begin to explain the way Pete felt infinite beneath his touch; how he'd always felt infinite and neverending and heart-wrenchingly impossible under Mikey's fingers? How can he even begin to explain how his world both seemed to compress and expand until all he could feel was the smooth coolness of Pete’s cheek, and all he could see was the expanse of the entire world, the entire universe?  
  
“It felt like electricity,” Mikey says.  
  
“Like an electric shock?” Pete asks.  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey agrees with a nod. “Like a zap of lightning.”   
  
“Like a transfer of energy.”  
  
“Like you were coming alive,” Mikey settles with.  
  
A silence settles between them.  
  
“Someone had to die so that I can live,” Pete whispers, hushed and afraid, as if such a dark thought can only be expressed through the most shamed of speeches.  
  
“That’s not on you,” Mikey replies in a tired voice. He is resigned in his resignation of forever carrying this heavy guilt, and his shoulders slump from the heavy weight of his own actions, his own choices, his own decisions.  
  
“Is it on you, then?” Pete demands.  
  
“Yeah,” Mikey says.  
  
“You didn’t choose to have these powers, Mikey,” Pete says with a ferociousness equal to only Gerard’s vehement proclamations and Frank’s proclaimed vehemence.  
  
“No, but I chose to keep you alive even though I knew the repercussions of doing so!” Mikey finally bursts out. His breathing is uneven, and each breath he takes in rattles painfully in his chest. Pete leans back against the couch cushions, and his fingers tighten visibly against the well-worn fabric of Gerard’s washed-out sweatpants.  
  
“You can touch me again—”  
  
“It doesn’t work like that,” Mikey interrupts Pete’s hushed offer. “Touching you will just kill you; it won’t bring the other person back.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Pete says, curling into himself.  
  
“Why’re you sorry?” Mikey asks, hating how small and faded Pete seems against the eclectic mix of pillows and throw blankets strewn all over the couch.  
  
“You feel guilty because I’m alive.”  
  
“No—fuck,” Mikey hisses out and swipes a hand over the shorn-short strands of his dyed-dark hair. “I—I feel guilty because of how happy I feel over the fact that you’re alive, even though I know that someone else had to die for this to happen.”  
  
Pete is crying in that way where tears are just drip, drip, dripping from his eyes like a faulty faucet. He’s quiet with it; there’s no heaving sobs or running runny noses, and he only looks all the smaller and more fragile for it. Mikey wants to wipe his tears away, but he can’t, so he has to make do with his words.  
  
“And I know this makes me a shitty, _shitty_ person,” he continues, breathless and aching and achingly breathless from it all, “but I can’t stand the thought of living in a world where you’re no longer there. When you moved away it was shit, but it was fucking bearable because I knew that you were kicking around a soccer ball somewhere in New Zealand. I knew that out there somewhere you were applying your eyeliner, and listening to Metallica, and doodling on whatever you can get your hands on. You were more than halfway across the world, but you were living your life, and I could live with that.”  
  
“Mikeyway—” Pete gasps out between two shuddery breaths.  
  
“But then you stopped forever,” Mikey continues, unstoppable and inevitable, and he feels like the missile that Gerard once described him as. “You stopped forever, and I have no fucking clue what you’ve been doing since I last heard from you, but whatever it was, you stopped. There would be no more laughter, and no more smiles, and no more rambling thoughts, and no more anything. Because there would be no more Pete Wentz. Because you stopped.” Mikey pauses, and he stares at Pete past his heaving chest and through his blurry eyes. “You stopped, and how was the world supposed to continue spinning on when you stopped?”  
  
Pete blinks rapidly before using the sleeves of Frank’s sweater to aggressively wipe at his cheeks and eyes. He sniffles and meets Mikey’s eyes again.  
  
“I really wish I can hold you right now,” Pete croaks out. He lets out a brokenly broken laugh, but it’s a laugh all the same, and all Mikey can do is echo it back.  
  
“I really wish I can hold you too,” Mikey replies truthfully, honestly.  
  
“You know, I thought about you all the time,” Pete confesses.  
  
“I know,” Mikey says gently. “I thought about you too.”  
  
“I should have called you more often,” Pete says in a rush. “I should have tried harder. I promised to be better, and I failed you.”  
  
“I should have picked up more often,” Mikey says in return. “I never should've let you go to voicemail, time-zones be damned.”  
  
“I missed you so much, Mikeyway,” Pete whispers.  
  
“I wish I was there for your eighteenth birthday,” Mikey whispers back. “I wish I was there for every single one of your birthdays.”  
  
They fall into silence, tethered to each other by their shared gazes and the warm blossoming feeling blooming and reawakening in their chests.  
  
“You can be there for my twenty-eighth birthday,” Pete finally says with a blotchy wet grin. “You’ll be my guest of honour.”  
  
“Okay,” Mikey agrees. And when Pete lets his lips gentle out into the kind familiarity of his Pete-sweet smile, Mikey can almost feel his warmth pressing against the long lines of his body.   
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> There are a lot of loose ends, I know. I've deliberately kept this story open-ended just so I can come back and add to it should I feel the need to do so. However, I do think this is a fairly well-contained story, and I'm awfully proud of it. 
> 
> If you've made it this far, thank you so much for reading!! Comments and kudos are always appreciated, and I hope you enjoyed the fic. :)


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